A warming tale of humanity, ecology

August 20, 2007|BY WILLIAM ARNOLD Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The movie year is only half over, but it's unlikely to produce a better Cinderella story than the saga of the making and marketing of Arctic Tale, an epic nature documentary that traces the coming-of-age of a polar bear and a walrus in the ever-warming Canadian North.

The film, which opened Friday, is the labor of love of Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson, a Vancouver Island-based husband-and-wife filmmaking team who began the project with no funding and modest aspirations. Over a 15-year period - and many trips to the Arctic - they saw it balloon into one of the most ambitious of all polar films.

In a recent interview, Ravetch seemed somewhat dazed by all the attention his film has been getting ("I often pinch myself") and attributes it mostly to the coincidence that it combines elements of two documentary blockbusters (and Oscar winners): March of the Penguins and An Inconvenient Truth.

Q. How did this all begin for you?

A. When I graduated from college [San Diego State University], I wanted to work in science but I also wanted to do something more physical than academic. So I became a scuba diver and instructor, which led to underwater photography and wildlife filmmaking. This work took me all over the world but I gradually became interested in the Arctic, especially after I married Sarah, who's Canadian and also has a fascination for the North.

Q. Your film takes the approach of the Disney true-life adventures of the '50s - documentaries like The Vanishing Prairie and White Wilderness - in which we get to know the animals as characters and identify with their survival plight. Was this intentional?

A. Not consciously. But I saw all those films as a kid and I loved them. And now that you mention it, the influence is definitely there. In a way I suppose Bambi fits into this formula, doesn't it? Even though it's animated and fictional. (Laughs) You don't get any more effective than Bambi.

Q. When did the idea of the film first hit you?

A. I can tell you exactly when it was. I was with a group of Inuit hunters who had taken a walrus pup - considered a great delicacy by their tribal elders. As their boat was hauling the pup away, its mother was frantically chasing after it, trying to free it, struggling to hold its little head above the water with its flippers so it wouldn't drown. It was heartbreaking and also incredibly human. I thought: If I can find a way to capture the love of that mother - the humanity of that scene - I will have a very special movie.

Q. And you gradually decided to focus on both a walrus and a polar bear?

A. Over the years we worked on the film, we were struck by the way the vanishing ice was creating enormous hardships for the polar bears - and how the scarcity of their normal prey was forcing them, for the first time, to hunt walruses. Also, like the walrus, the polar bear mother spends three years training its young, and its parental devotion touched us. So we decided to deal with both rival animals, chronicling their lives from birth to their first reproduction.

Q. It looks like it must have been . . . an enormously difficult shoot.

A. Well, it required a lot of patience - returning year after year, following the animals, diving under the ice, straining not to be obtrusive, waiting for something to happen. But we're minimalist filmmakers - we didn't have a large camera crew - and we weren't shooting in Imax, so we had a lot of mobility.

Q. In a film like this, it's hard to tell what is real and what is not.

A. Both Nanu (the bear cub) and Seela (the walrus pup) are composites of a number of animals we followed. And though it looks like it takes place in one area, we actually filmed in locations all over the Arctic. Obviously, we order and shape the scenes to tell a story. Everything you see in the film is real and nothing has been staged but, as the title says, it's a tale.

Q. What made you choose Queen Latifah as narrator?

A. Since the animal characters were mothers and daughters, we felt we needed a woman's voice. We also wanted it to be a strong voice - with a touch of maternal concern and humor. Our storyteller is an all-seeing, all-knowing sensibility: the voice of Mother Ice. There were a lot of good candidates for this role but Queen Latifah seemed perfect.

Q. Was global warming one of your major concerns when you began the film?

A. Not at all. When we started out, we knew next to nothing about the threat of global warming. We learned as the world did. But as we did, that concern gradually became a major element of the film.

Q. Al Gore's daughter is listed as one of your screenwriters. Was An Inconvenient Truth a major influence on you?

A. Actually, Arctic Tale was nearly done when the Gore film came out last year. But it was an influence of sorts because we knew it would free us from having to present the case for global warming. It did that job for us, so we were able to tell a more intimate story of how global warming was threatening the existence of specific animals. Kristin Gore's contribution - which was significant - was mostly adding touches of humor.

Q. At the current rate of global warming, the ice will vanish from the Arctic by the year 2040. Are you optimistic that this cataclysm can be turned around?

A. I'm very optimistic. I believe there's been a big shift in the public's awareness of the problem in the last few years - particularly in younger people. This is why we decided to close the film with shots of children telling us some of the things we can do about the threat and about how even the smallest changes we make in our lives could save an animal's life in the Arctic.